It’s the relentless China-is-wonderful gig. Reporting from Tianjin, Tom advises that Chinese are set to beat us again, this time in above-ground “green” plastic-mining.
He finds two sources, one a flack for Chinese innovation, another someone named Mike Biddle, the standard American businessman — this one rationalizing the shipping of most of his work overseas because he just can’t afford enough lobbyists to get Washington to listen to his plan to create plastic mines from discarded computer junk for him. All our fault!
This is Friedman’s brain at work. Meet a flack and a businessman at some economic meeting of the wealthy where he can undertake the job of official ass-sniffer while masquerading as someone sifting through cutting-edge brain power. Then whip out a column on the farting. wisdom emitted.
“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,??? said the flack for Tom. Tom would have said it, but since he had the p.r. person for the “Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy” around …
Last week, Tom told us we all needed to adopt more Confucian values because we aren’t sacrificing enough.
If you Google Tom Friedman and pie you get pages of stuff on the man being pelted with green whipped cream while onstage at Brown in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was rooting for the pie throwers — before and after.
The video is on Youtube in a couple spots. It’s great footage of Friedman slipping about and eventually giving up. If you were a two-time Pulitzer winner, would you have let a couple pies upset you? No! I bet you’d just have smiled, shouted some defiance at the auditorium and continued your speech.
Here’s this blog’s Tom Friedman Blooz, homemade video of the pie incident with a hodgepodge of senseless quote taken from Friedman columns (including today’s) on China. It’s set to the “China Toilet Blooz Reprise,” a Captain Beefheart-styled outro to the original I’ve been flogging.
The Biddle fellow, according to Friedman, is based in California. And he’d keep 250 whole jobs here. But we just don’t have those booming above-ground plastic mines.
More Tea Party music, this time set to Bob Seger tracks “Like a Rock” and “Turn the Page.”
“They Liked Barack” is the better of the two. It had me laughing — sometimes by real intent. Whatever the reason, the softer approach than usual Tea Party material works.
“Change the Change” — hmmm, could’ve used a better central lyric. “Unemployed again …” is good, even though it confuses the crashed economy for the middle class with the arrival of Obama.
Nb: The ChangetheChange fellow also rebrands Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover as Fifty Ways to Save Our Country. The karoake track betrays him a little when the background singers come in. But it’s made up for by his swimming pool shot.
Some additional notes from today’s hardcopy Los Angeles Times, including a frank admission that the food regulatory system is broken.
Completely, DD might add.
It’s more proof that nobody in power is really interested in doing anything about the Dickensian characters from US agribusiness who emerge as threats to the general welfare.
But they are always ready to throw immoral amounts of money at bioterrorism research and defense into protecting against an outside threat.
“[While] most policy-makers and food safety experts agree the regulatory system is broken, they also agree that chances of a significant overhaul anytime soon are dwindling,” reported the newspaper here.
Unintentionally telling lines, an excuse, actually:
“In what FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently termed an ‘unfortunate irony,’ new FDA rules governing egg safety went into effect July 9, too late to prevent the current salmonella outbreak.”
In a sidebar piece, Eat Shit Farms Wright County Egg in Iowa was announced as the target of a civil suit including sickened people from six states.
“Self-policing doesn’t work,” said the lawyer representing them, during a press conference announcing the suit. “The farms failed to follow US regulations to prevent contamination,” reads the newspaper.
The Wright County Egg salmonella distribution “is the largest instance of salmonella poisoning since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking cases more than thirty years ago.”
In the last installment of Eat Shit Farms, I contrasted Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s Iowa tainted egg farms with the case of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon in which the group instigated deliberate salmonella contamination.
In 1984, the Rajneeshee sickened 751 people with Salmonella typhimurium.
DeCoster’s firm is responsible for 1,519 diagnosed cases of salmonellosis.
The lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the suit estimated the number much higher.
Information about an anti-BP candlelight vigil, a gay and lesbian festival and other peaceful gatherings became the subject of anti-terrorism bulletins being distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office, an apologetic Gov. Ed Rendell admitted.
Rendell, who claimed he’d just learned about the practice, said Tuesday
that the information was useless to law enforcement agencies and that
distributing it was tantamount to trampling on constitutional rights.
In recent weeks, several acts of vandalism at drilling sites spurred the
inclusion of events likely to be attended by environmentalists and the
bulletins began going to representatives of Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry.
A Philadelphia rally organized by a nonprofit group to support Rendell’s push for higher spending on public schools even made a bulletin, as did drilling protests at a couple of Rendell’s news conferences this month as he toured the state to boost support for a tax on the natural gas industry.
And who was getting the funding for this valuable intelligence on the state of homegrown terrorism?
Something called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, in Philadelphia, to the tune of $125,000.
It’s website is here, listing a POB in Philadelphia as well as a branch in Jerusalem.
It emits a bit of an unpleasant odor.
For example, to collect intelligence for its clients is relies, it says, on something called its Ground Truth Network.
And apparently the company’s Ground Truth Network, or analysts, have been eying the protest movement against gas drilling (and even a public showing of the documentary “Gasland,” a scathing look at the industry nationwide), now commonly called “fracking” in Pennsylvania.
In “Gasland,” the rural Pennsylvania community of Dimock is profiled. In great detail, it shows how the place was ruined and its water contaminated by drilling.
The intelligence document came to light when it was posted on a pro-drilling forum on the web, whereupon it was also seized by anti-drilling groups.
The company distributes its intelligence product to the Pennsylvania director of homeland security, law enforcement and gas drilling companies.
James Powers, the Pennsy director of homeland security was quizzed by the Harrisburg Patriot-News and that article is here.
PA governor Ed Rendell indicated to the Associated Press that James Powers would not be fired even though he was “appalled” by the news.
“I think I would have said `no’ to this contract before we ever spent a dime and before we sent out any information that was wrong and violative of, in my judgment, the constitution,” the governor said.
“Which public meetings the anti-drilling folks were planning to attend was supplied by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia firm contracted with the state Office of Homeland Security to provide information for the intelligence briefings,” reported the Patriot News.
“When asked if ITRR was tracking groups — specifically, people opposed to drilling in the Marcellus Shale or attending showings of ‘Gasland’ — [James Powers, PA director of homeland security] replied, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t asked them.’
“Powers did indicate that someone — either ITRR or state employees, he wouldn’t specify which — was monitoring the ‘Web traffic’ of anti-drilling groups.”
Rendell said the firm’s contract would come to an end.
“Gasland” has also recently been showing on HBO and it has gained many favorable reviews.
Erik Miller, “the Director of Security Studies at the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), where he serves as project-manager, case officer, researcher, and intelligence writer,” has an article in the recent issue of Counter Terrorism magazine.
On Sweden and alleged radicalism in that country, it begins:
To many, Sweden is a leading model for what a modern, liberal democracy should be; an exemplar of tolerance, humanitarianism, and diplomacy. To those who monitor global jihadism, however, Sweden has shown a severe lack of leadership in confronting the growing problem of Islamic radicalization within its own borders.
Even as newly-emerging evidence continues to expose this process of radicalization; the Swedish establishment fails to face the problem directly. In the name of multiculturalism and religious equality, leading Swedish figures have chosen not only to deny the issue but to seemingly embrace their homegrown Islamists.
This phenomenon is a new form of nationwide “Stockholm Syndrome” that is self-deceptive, self-defeating, and ultimately, suicidal.
And here is what looks like one of the company’s reports — originated perhaps from its Jerusalem office, posted on another website.
A sample ITRR intel briefing booklet from 2009 is posted here, on the company website.
It is not particularly insightful, seemingly only a .pdf collection of bits anyone interested in terrorism could assemble from sifting public news.
But it is probably the type of briefing book discussed by the AP and Harrisburg Patriot News.
The AP, on the material included in the ITRR intel report distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office says:
It listed demonstrations by anti-war groups, deportation protesters in Philadelphia, mountaintop removal mining protesters in West Virginia and an animal rights protest at a Montgomery County rodeo. It also included “Burn the Confederate Flag Day,” the Jewish high holidays and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as potential sources of risk.
On page 11 of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response’s sample May 2009 briefing book, the organization lumps a number of equally surprising activities under the topic “Domestic/Eco-Terror Alerts.”
Among these, “the Rainforest Action Network is holding training at campuses across the [continental United States]. The training is designed to inspire ecological activity — from legitimate canvassing to illegal direct actions.”
The very legit Rainforest Action Network is here. It looks like a happy place.
In another posting, the ITRR bulletin reads: “Ecological activists in [San Francisco, Phoenix, Tuscon and Sonora} will be protesting the intent of Mexico to build a toxic waste dump on land belonging to the O’odham Indians.”
Other “domestic/eco-terror alert” entries include notes on protests of the Bank of America bailout scheduled for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, “a protest march … held by people opposed to the closing of some schools in New York City, “eco-activists” from Earth First! holding a summer training camp, institute analysts monitoring “anarchists” who might protest an appearance by Karl Rove, as well as a variety of anti-war and anti-cruelty-to-animals protest events.
The intelligence booklet makes a practice of classifying people, groups and non-profits who protest corporate activities as “anarchists.”
“Working with organizations that refuse to surrender their domestic or international operations to terrorism,” reads the pamphlet.
Terrorism, in this case, seeming to broadly rope in constitutionally protected activities contrary to the interests of corporate and government clients.
Another article by ITRR experts, this time on al Qaeda’s use of the Internet is here.
It is, many will agree, a trifle underwhelming as an example of this type of counter-terrorism literature.
Pennsylvania’s director of homeland security, James Powers, characterized the leaked ITRR briefing .pdf in one embarrassing e-mail as “sensitive information” only for “those ‘having a valid need to know.’ ”
Called Citizens for Liberty, it’s your standard collection of white Tea Party crazies — global warming is a hoax, Obamacare must be repealed, stimulus money to South Dakota for schools and public services is a drug that will addict the people to the Federal government.
The Tea Party candidate is Kristi Noem, who will be sharing the stage with Nugent. Like everyone else from the party, she’s someone from the American extremist fringe, but interestingly so.
A SD newspaper article notes Noem’s stellar record as a driver: 27 citations in 21 years. However, according to the newspaper, her Dem opponent also drives fast and speeding tickets seem to be a way of life in South Dakota, a state which has only 800,000 some people living in it.
Along with speeding, Noem’s 27 citations include not wearing a seat belt, two instances of running a stop sign, expired license-plate tags and no driver’s license. She missed court appearance or payment dates seven times. And in two instances, the court issued a warrant to force payment.
Noem points out that she did end up paying all of her fines, even if some were late.
Noem’s total of 20 speeding tickets in 21 years is “certainly
above average, but really not all that uncommon.???
It isn’t that uncommon in Noem’s family, based on court records
since 1989. Noem’s husband, Bryon, had 18 recorded traffic
citations during that period, 11 of them for speeding. Noem’s
brother, Rock Arnold, had 34 citations during that period, 25 of
them for speeding. He also missed court or fine payment dates four
times and had warrants issued three times. Another brother, Robb,
had 21 citations, including 12 for speeding.
And here’s me performing coincidentally perfect musical accompaniment, “Highway Patrol,” in 1985.
“I bought a new toilet! It was made in China. That’s where all the jobs went. Nothin’ could be finer!” — live verse from ‘China Toilet Blooz‘ and I do play the harmonica.
Ahem, the New York Times has run a bit asking the question: Are there any jobs that can’t be outsourced?
Well, yeah, menial cleaning, restaurant work, anything that requires a face-to-face connection. I’m willing to bet that overuse of robots and telepresence will cause the same resistance and disgust the phenomenon does on help and corporate telephone lines.
The best jobs program is trade reform with China. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it has used a potent set of mercantilist and protectionist policies to shift millions of American manufacturing jobs offshore.
America can compete in the international environment if “free trade” is also fair.
America’s unemployed skilled manufacturing workers – both white-and blue-collar – can only trade down …
Regrettably, the current generation of unemployed workers is lost until the White House and Congress find backbones to stand up to Chinese trade policies.
In an aside, if you’re wondering why I’ve shifted increasingly away from security discussions that are purely on weird weapons lobbies and fear-mongering, it’s because the security of the country ultimately lies within. If rot and economic unfairness cleans out the middle class, there is no security.
As it stands, the US is unstable. And it can easily become moreso. An unstable US is not good for the rest of the world.
Irrational leadership leads to war and hardship inflicted on others, not just on ourselves. And if there is anyone who thinks that putting the Republican Party in control in Congress won’t lead to greater national instability, they need to get away from this blog. Nothing for you here.
Moreover, there is neither a shortage of U.S. students who are world-class in their educational performance nor of college graduates with science and engineering degrees. The U.S. can claim the lion’s share of the world’s highest performing (domestic) science students and continues to graduate more than two times the number of scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Meanwhile, we produce an astounding number of very low performing students. Improving education is important but focusing on top tier skills is not a panacea for unemployment or poor economic performance …
Job growth requires a coordinated policy response that includes some protection for U.S. workers as well as stimulating demand for domestic products and services.
I would add to these assessments that there can’t be any changes until American business is harshly penalized for deindustrializing to slave labor work nations. Others have called for a democracy tariff, a price put on imports at the border for those things coming from such ‘beggar-they-neighbor’ living spaces.
I’ve said that the Obama administration’s tax incentives are essentially bribes to American business. Instead of hiring the unemployed directly, the president resorts to trickle-down efforts, hoping that some manner of payoff will juice American business into hiring.
The frontpage of yesterday’s hardcopy (no link) Los Angeles Times had, as its headline: R&D effort may yield scant jobs.
The part worth excerpting, which is pretty obvious:
Over the last two decades, US scientists and engineers have discovered or pioneered the science behind one blockbuster product after another — from flat-panel screens and robotics to the lithium batteries that run next generation power tools and electric cars.
Yet, in almost every case, production, jobs and most of the economic benefits that sprang from those breakthroughs have ended up overseas.
===
And new reports show that during the recession American companies ramped up investment overseas for plants and new hires, as well research and development — even as they cut back domestically.
So what didn’t get outsourced in the Great Recession?
Census jobs. It required face to face work and an enterprising, ad hoc, self-motivating mass workforce. I kinow. I was part of it.
The US government could change things by choosing to hire people directly for national reclamation. There would be the usual business outcry that by putting itself in competition with the private sector for such work, it was being bad in all the usual ways. Anti-competitive, socialist, communist, etc.
But when you have an American business culture that’s already accustomed to just taking the bribe money and using it to hurt the US labor force even more, there would seem to be little downside to actually putting people to work without private sector help.
It did not paint this part of the weapons industry as a boon. Building flying robot assassins employs only 10,000. It’s a relative drop in the bucket for a southern California economy that’s bigger than most world nations.
And while 10,000 do have jobs in it, it’s an industry that generates little worth to the middle class. Other than stimulating the local economy where workers presumably spend much of their pay.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
The Times article also addressed all the downside associated with the industry. Its political lobbying, the legalized political bribery, the association with scumbags like Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
It wrote about the fact that as technology, the drones pretty much suck. They are not miraculous things.
They’re expensive and not useful against any country that has an air defense. They were a joke over lowly Bosnia, it was said, and no one wanted them prior to 9/11.
Which again only shows the war on terror as a growth opportunity for those parts of the American economy which very little to do with a healthy middle class.
In it, drones are used to bump off poor people — “terrorists” after drinking water — in Mexico, their video footage used as entertainment in reality show American programming.
Just prior to 9/11, the Times writes of a Predator sales pitch:
The Predator could be used to spot wildfires, [the General Atomics salesman] told his latest prospects. It could monitor global warming.
The audience listened politely — then scattered quickly when the demonstration ended. There were no takers.
Despite the constant braying about it, “[The drone business is] still not big enough to single-handedly restore the Southland aerospace industry to its former glory,” concluded the Times.
These are the jobs that are not outsourced. Wow.
Thanks heavens they’re as nasty as everyone thinks
From CNBC, billionaires bum out at esatz Davos over US and Obama administration:
“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,??? said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.???
A massive reduction in the consumer debt load, a workforce without the right skills for the jobs of tomorrow, and too high labor costs relative to other countries “are not problems that are likely to be solved any time soon,??? wrote Wien of the attitude of the people at the lunches, which took place in two groups on successive Fridays last month. “Only a few investors thought the Standard & Poor’s could reach 1200 next year.???
So what are the billionaires buying if this environment continues? Wien said “vacant office building,??? “farmland??? and “Africa??? were some of the ideas thrown out.
China’s plans to vaccinate 100 million children and come a step closer to eradicating measles has set off a popular outcry that highlights widening public distrust of the authoritarian government after repeated health scandals.
It stems from distrust of the central government and its response to the regular appearance of poisoned food and health products in the Chinese consumer chain, among other places worldwide.
AP reads:
“The lack of trust toward our food and health products was not formed in one day,” said the Global Times newspaper. “Repairing the damage and building credibility will take a very long time. The public health departments need to take immediate action on all fronts.”
In recent years, government agencies have dragged their feet or withheld information about the spread of SARS, bird flu and, last month, an outbreak of cholera. China’s slow response to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, was widely blamed for causing the outbreak that swept the globe in 2003, and led to deep mistrust both internally and internationally.
Milk products contaminated with industrial chemicals are still found despite mass recalls and several criminal convictions, including
executions, after tainted infant formula sickened 300,000 babies and killed at least six two years ago.
Or pass it over to read even more rot from little Tommy Friedman, again off on his current jag about how the middle class is spoiled and lazy. And it will have to sacrifice even more in the coming years (probably true, but not because of anything he thinks is the reason):
Who will tell the people? China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations.
In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever. Right now the Hindus and Confucians have more Protestant ethics than we do, and as long as that is the case we’ll be No. 11!
Not enough Protestant work ethic, prole slobs!
Values do matter more than ever. And Friedman surely doesn’t have them, either. In fact he’s the cigarette smoker so addicted he forgets he has two hanging out of his mouth when he tells ya to quite smoking.
Friedman needs to be one of the first to go in any long overdue turn of the tide in the class war.
In the same edition of the newspaper, Paul Krugman publishes a more hostile piece toward China, while dragging in US business a little bit.
China is beggaring the west by manipulating its money and subsidizing exports, which readers will have noted American businesses which have deindustrialized are only too happy to take advantage of at everyone else’s expense.
And in a depressed world economy, any country running an artificial trade surplus is depriving other nations of much-needed sales and jobs. Again, anyone who asserts otherwise is claiming that China is somehow exempt from the economic logic that has always applied to everyone else.
There is an American passivity in response to this, writes Krugman, partly caused by “business fear of Chinese retaliation.”
“So this is a good time to remember that what’s good for multinational companies is often bad for America, especially its workers … Will U.S. policy makers let themselves be spooked by financial phantoms and bullied by business intimidation? Will they continue to do nothing in the face of policies that benefit Chinese special interests at the expense of both Chinese and American workers?”
I’ve edited it down a bit so you should read the entire thing. It makes a much finer argument than you’ll ever read here.
I’ll stick to the blunt: I bought a new toilet! It was made in China!
“[Pieces of jewelry] meant for little girls, they hung on simple faux silver necklaces and cost as little as $8.00.
And they were potentially deadly, according to consumer advocates. This type of cheap costume jewelry made with the metal cadmium, which can be toxic at high levels, is at the heart of the latest ‘made in China’ scare.
Since January, the Consumer Product Safety Division has targeted more than 200,000 pieces of cheap jewelry from China that were made with cadmium and sold at numerous national retail chains, including Wal-Mart and Claire’s.
The story informs when the US virtually banned toxic lead from Chinese toys in 2008, the factories in the country simply moved to cancer-causing cadmium.
“Because entry into low-end jewelry manufacturing in China is inexpensive, competition is tough and factories do all they can to stay afloat, even if that means using toxic materials,” reads the newspaper. “The US EPA labels cadmium a ‘probable human carcinogen.””
Inevitably, it’s the Dickensian nature of US business practice which must take much of the blame.
The story interviews Chinese manufacturers who could make non-toxic jewelry. But it costs more and the pressure is tremendous for the cheapest goods. To sell in the US — presumably at Wal-Marts.
Again, the image of US de-industrialization, the shipping of jobs making things overseas where American businesses can exert pressure on the manurfacturers for the cheapest goods, playing one against the other, not having to worry about any environmental or labor laws. Until an understaffed US regulatory agency catches up years later.
At which point something else conveniently cheap and bad is found as a substitute.
The Chinese will use quantum teleportation to communicate with their new submarine fleet, using blue lasers!
“China is now at the cutting-edge of military communications, transforming the field of cryptography and spotlighting a growing communications arms race … While the People’s Liberation Army won’t be beaming up objects Star Trek-style anytime soon, the new technology could greatly enhance its command and control capabilities,” it reads.
“The Chinese could even destroy their opponents’ electronic control systems – critical to the operation of ground vehicles and aircraft – by producing damaging current and voltage surges with the help of electromagnetic pulse bombs loaded into the DF-21D [supermissile], reported the Asia Times. “Yet another option would be to fit a missile with a thermobaric fuel-air bomb.”
Every Chinese weapon or threat — from quantum teleportation to supermissiles to the ever present stories on that country’s cyberwarriors — never suffers from any taint of intimation that they might be afflicted with the same fundamental essence of crap associated with that nation’s consumer products.
Everyday Americans have experience with Chinese-made products, even if they regret it. There’s no escape, no way out. US business de-industrialized for the sake of leveraging slave work over expensive American labor and regulation.
So in everything from toilet seats to stub wrenches to socks, all goods are ersatz, inferior and often surprisingly dangerous in interesting ways. But cheap.And — of ultimate importance — not made by Americans. Because that would be bad for the bottom line.
From old DD blog in early 2009:
We’re getting a dose of what security means [these days]: A fallen over economy and mass-firings. In the past eight years, our leaders were good at making us look the other way. See the Islamic terrorists! They want to destroy our way of life!
But underneath our noses a different story unfolded, one of a place that made no sense, a land that worked hard at crushing a Middle Class way of life all by itself.
Let’s employ a bit of a fable to define it: The tale of the broken stub wrench, pictured above.
In southern California, everyone has embedded lawn sprinklers. And sometimes, the sprinkler heads are damaged, like when your neighbor runs over one with his SUV. When that happens, you have to replace the fractured sprinkler. And that job requires that you remove a broken piece of it, called a stub, from the water pipe outlet which serves the sprinkler.
There is a tool for doing this and it is called a stub wrench.
DD did not have a stub wrench when this happened to a sprinkler in his yard last summer. So I went to the hardware store on Colorado Street in Pasadena to buy one. That stub wrench is pictured above. It was made in China.
For a stub wrench to work, it has to be a little like a corkscrew. That is, you have to be able to twist it into the broken plastic stub of the sprinkler head. Burrs on the tip of it dig into the stub, allowing you to untwist the broken piece from the outlet coupling, thus removing it. Then you can screw in a replacement sprinkler.
This stub wrench had no burrs and DD didn’t notice until he got home. No matter how I tried to make it work, no dice.
So DD went back to the hardware store and marveled at an entire shelf of ‘made in China’ stub wrenches, all the same, all guaranteed not to work, all with the name of an American company on them. But they were cheap, only about three dollars a piece.
It was an astounding display, not just because of the broken-before-buying quality of the goods, but also because it was obvious that people who bought them never complained. So these non-working items just stayed in stock and were never removed, a Ponzi pay-and-get-ripped-off scheme on the micro-scale, a metaphor for the entire economy, now collapsed but still sitting on the shelf in its polystyrene shrink wrap — broke.
And whenever I read about whatever wonder weapon the Chinese are said to come up with, I laugh, because it’s invariably delivered by US sources in one of the parts of the economy which doesn’t really care if there is a Middle Class, the national security complex. It’s only important to find a trivial menace to inflate until it’s a suitably sized horror.
Socks, under the American name of Hanes (which also used to be an American-made brand until that company purged its workers, too, in favor of the cheap), which become moth-eaten looking after three trips through the washing machine never figure in these stories.
That China can’t make socks which don’t sprout holes after a few weeks isn’t notable.
How does DD know? I thought it would be a good idea to buy some socks before heading out on the downtown Pasadena census-taking trail this summer. I learned my lesson.
It’s worth repeating an excerpt from an earlier post on Chinese manufacturing and US de-industrialization:
The Pentagon often worries about fighting a regional war with the Chinese military. DD never worries about that. Chinese manufacturing has serious systemic quality control issues. The evidence on the national table is that the country simply can’t produce anything that is robust, up-to-standard or poison free. A lot of the time, this doesn’t matter. For instance, it’s not really of major issue if their blues harps and toilet seats really eat it.
However, their jet airplanes, their ships, their rockets and missiles? Heh-heh. C’mon now, seriously.
A NY Times column noted by Digby puts forward the mainstreaming of extremism and incivility as normal public discourse, a point I’ve made in connection with Ted Nugent all summer.
The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the “liberal” one and the “conservative” one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.
And so the mainstream is now defined by a balance between the reasonable and a demographic that represents nothing but the worst from the American fringe haunch — cranks, kooks and bigots, all aimed at tearing down what any modern western nation should stand for.
The media has no skin in this game, though. It has nothing to lose when it gives the crazies the megaphone.
Its marquee employees are all upper class and they’ll do fine, even when the nation lurches into disaster if the insane take over a part of government in November. It’s more entertainment for them, more opportunities for bigtime books on the subject, more television face time. More of everything while the rest shrivel up in the decay outside the mansions.
But back to Ted Nugent who was on radio prior to his Labor Day weekend show in Detroit.
The only parts of interest on this blog are Ted making excuses about his hunting screw-up and the standard misrepresentations of his various accomplishments.
I did a rough transcript and after exchanging opening pleasantries, Ted is asked about his hunting violations.
“What a klusterbuck the court system is. I wish I could talk more about it now but it’s still ongoing … Bottom line, I broke no laws.”
It was, Ted insists, part of a campaign against his Spirit of the Wild program. Animal rights activists and others who hate him watch it for all transgressions and harass him regularly.
“They monitor my Spirit of the Wild program … because it’s California they are overwhelmed with people who really can’t stand me …”
Ted explains that on his show he is shown killing three deer with captions saying when he shot them properly. One in one calendar year, two in another. But that this was used against him.
“Here it is … This is the perfect point, on this one show, I killed three deer, you’re only allowed two a year. We got thousands of calls at our office, people squallering that I killed three deer in one year…”
The conversation moves to the Park51 prayer center.
“Well, I would certainly welcome you guys [to my website]. On my website you see literally thousands and thousands of columns.”
Ted refers to his opinions at the Washington Times and Human Events.
“I get more hits than almost everybody … I reflected what I think is common sense America … I can’t think of anything more cruel and more intentionally outrageous than the Japanese building a monument at Pearl Harbor in 1942 …
“This imam … the jury is still out … he is not a friend of America.”
The radio DJ’s say the man is in the employ of the US State Department.
That is because, Ted replies, “We have the Mao Tse Tung Fan Club in the Whitehouse.”
Here is what Nugent wrote about the issue at the Washington Times, none of which is actually re-read on the air:
“Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City. Instead of using the $100 million for their proposed mosque, I recommend that the Muslims donate the cash to the U.S. military so we can build more smart bombs to kill more radical, voodoo Muslims …
“Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet …”
“Where the Muslims will claim they are wanting to build bridges, they will stab you in the eye less than a mile from Ground Zero,” Ted tells the DJ’s at one point.
The conversation moves on to Mexico, Arizona and illegal immigration. At one point Ted insinuates terrorists are coming over the border. The code is “otm’s” for other-than-Mexicans.”
On the President: “This guy is out of his mind.”
The DJ’s chime in: “Harry Reid and these sons of bitches …”
When the interview finally gets to music, Ted informs he would really like to have Kid Rock on his next album.
Nugent adds that he drew “45,000 at Fond-Du-Lac. I hold the the attendance record at every county fair in Wisconsin.”
While there is no reason to doubt the last sentence on being big in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, the reality is a little more nuanced:
From the local Fond-Du-Lac Reporter, actually reprinted at tednugent.com:
45,000 turn out for Fair
July 28, 2010
Ted Nugent brought out the fans for this year’s Fond du Lac County Fair.
About 45,000 people attended the 159th Fair, held July 20-25 at the County Fairgrounds on Martin Avenue. Fair Manager Matt Immel said it’s an impressive figure, considering how much it rained during this year’s event.
Saturday recorded the highest attendance of any day, with 15,000 people passing through the gates. Immel said Ted Nugent drew the big crowd; his concert sold 700 VIP tickets. The fair normally sells 600 VIP tickets at $15 apiece, but there was enough demand to add more seats.
Over five days, of which Ted Nugent was there on one, the fair drew 45,000. One third came on Saturday when Nugent played the grandstand. Common sense requires the concession that not everyone was there to see and hear Ted Nugent.
It is a bit underwhelming, much like Pine Grove Area High School’s football field grandstand, or any outdoor bleechers in some out of the way place.
For the purposes of comparison and conversation, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena holds 92,000, twice the capacity reported over five days at the Fond-du-Lac fair.
DD thinks readers can agree the Fond-du-Lac fair grandstand is not even close to a quarter of the Rose Bowl, which would be a generous 25,000.
DD thinks 700 to 1,000 is about right, absolute tops.
Ted Nugent was also recently reviewed in Des Moines — by a reporter for Grand View College’s student newspaper.
Ted Nugent didn’t waste a minute making his political views heard on Wednesday at the 7 Flags Event Center. The 62-year-old Nuge rocked the stage in front of 2,000 “American Blood Brothers.”
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For a man who hasn’t released an album in over 15 years (wrong — but irrelevant to the essence of the review), Ted has a surprisingly large following. The majority of the crowd was at least 50 years old. That might be how I arrived 45 minutes before the doors opened, was the seventh person in the doors and stood front row for the entire show.
The stage was filled with big guns, small guns, machine guns, grenades and an air brushed canvas backdrop that showed Ted yielding guns and driving a tank over the top of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The show wasn’t all political bashing, however. Ted took the stage and played four songs before stopping to catch his breath and welcome the sold out crowd. He was welcomed with an arousing ovation from the mix of military personnel, hunters, veterans and rock enthusiasts.
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The show wasn’t all redneck racism. Ted, being from Detroit, recognized his influences, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson, by playing a few covers that sent the crowd into a frenzy. Nugent preached to always remember where you come from and thank those who made you who you are today.
As an avid hunter and rock and roll fan, I found the Ted Nugent concert to be an awesome experience.
“The show wasn’t all redneck racism.” Good to know.
Bedbugs are having a party in the US. If you could own them as an appreciating asset, they’d be better than gold.
Which is sort of what a New York Times story had to say on the pests a few days ago.
In hard times, the only people doing well are the rich and bedbug exterminators.
“Bedbugs gave Linda Develasco of Des Plaines, Ill., a new career when she was laid off from her job as a new-accounts manager at Verizon two years ago,” reported the Times. “Having learned about bedbugs in the hospitality industry from her fiancé, who was general manager of a hotel, she bought a bedbug-sniffing beagle named Scooby for $9,700. She recouped the expense within three months by doing one to three inspections each week.”
You will want to read to the part where one exterminator is so happy over bedbug infestation he has to pull over to the side of the road and do a little jig. Bedbugs meant his ship came in big time.
For every story like this there have been at least a dozen on what to do about bedbugs and why they’re multiplying.
The New York Times story gives some inkling and it jives with DD’s thinking and experience.
Keep in mind, bedbugs live with people. And when people are forced to move bedbugs move with them.
The Times story informs that in the catastrophe economy, many apartment managers cut back on exterminations, hoping to save money. And if you’ve been living in an apartment complex, you know the Great Recession has caused a great deal of churn. People move in — a month or two later, they’re gone.
In the short term, apartment managers probably thought they were saving money. But they never counted on bedbugs hitching a ride in inside the packaging and mattresses of the displaced moving in from other places. Or resurgence of the insects once a spraying regime wasn’t suppressing them.
DD worked enumerating downtown Pasadena for the census. It is the most densely populated part of town with most of the people living in apartments, ritzy condos and older homes subdivided into boarding room flophouses.
During the time of the census it was quite apparent to me and a friend working the same beat that the Great Recession was having a real impact. And none of it was good.
There were people moving in and out everywhere. And there was a good amount of vacancy and noticeable deterioration, even in the most outwardly upscale-looking complexes. In such places, the corporate management often fought hard to impede the US Census. They did not readily disclose the number of vacancies in their buildings.
In fact, often they had to be forced into cooperation with the government, either by firmly telling them it was the law that they comply, or by simply going into the places and doing it the hard way — knocking on the doors of all the tenants next door to units which did not respond and questioning them until a complete picture on the address block was assembled.
Corporate property management’s often surprising and dismaying opposition to the federal mandate is a topic for greater discussion in another post. But in the context of this one on bedbugs, some of it had to do with bosses trying to cover up their rates of vacancy arising from the Great Recession.
Scientists are, naturally, keenly interested in why bedbugs have become such a problem. Some have ventured to say that it’s because they have achieved a surprising resistance to pesticides. This is true but also probably not the entire story, which will only emerge in a few years.
DD reckons bedbug success is due, in part, to US fail. The economic slump has ripped up a lot of lives and thrown them into the wind. And those who are renters who have lost lodgings, along with the cut back in sprayings at the same places, have created a great environment in which bedbugs can breed freely and hitch rides on the dislocated.
If you read the New York Times story, bedbug extermination isn’t cheap. In fact, it’s priced as a scarce commodity in a time of need.
No standard renter is going to pay $500 or up for a Terminix man to come to their place and get rid of bedbugs.
They’ll try to do it themselves with insecticides from the hardware store and keep quiet about it. And learn to battle or live with the pests until better days come around.
If they ever do. In the meantime, bedbugs will be doing fine.
